SOURCE: "Petronius," in The Greek and Roman Critics, University of Toronto Press, 1965, pp. 262-8.

In the following excerpt, Grube outlines Petronius's thoughts on poetry, particularly his attack on declamations and his assessment that the arts had reached a degenerated state in Rome.

… [Petronius] is always superbly alive.1 In that amazing medley of riotous and indecent adventures which make up the Satyricon we find several passages bearing on literature. The book as we have it begins with a violent tirade against the practice of declamations which Encolpius addresses to a teacher of rhetoric called Agamemnon. It may be quoted here as a typical denunciation, making, in a more lively manner, most of the criticisms which recur throughout the century:

Are declaimers pursued by another kind of Furies when they shout: 'These wounds were received on behalf of our public freedom', 'this eye was lost for your sake', 'give me...